Title says it all pretty much. Lol. What’s a good major to pick that doesn’t involve huge amounts of math, will make you a good amount of money and gives you a pretty high chance of finding a job after you graduate.
Information technology, perhaps?
A lot of IT jobs and other high-end white collar jobs are being offshored to India.
Alright then, politics. 8-}
Just kidding. What are you interested in?
Accounting is a solid career.
It really depends on what you are interested in. If you choose public health, health education or biology you have a wide range of job opportunities available. I think computers is a good field to get invested in as well.
Interestingly enough, I have always thought about politics! :))
My real love is history. But seeing as about all you can do with that is be a professor. I’m gonna have to settle for something else. I’ve always thought about law school. Just not entirely sure it’s worth it…
Professor? Why not consider being a school teacher? The vacation time, pension & job security is great. The job isn’t going to be offshored to India. And it’s deeply personally gratifying.
And you can see the world if you want to work the international school circuit.
As the mayor of Chelsea MA said in a 60 minutes interview from his prison cell.
“The pay isn’t great, but the tips are excellent!”.
What is “huge amounts of math?”
What is “a good amount of money”?
What is “a pretty high chance”?
Majors do not lead to money - careers/jobs are what lead to money. You can major in psychology and become a social worker making $42,000 a year or become a surgeon making $420,000 a year. Majors can influence the kinds of jobs that are available to you, but they don’t solely determine that - your skills, internships, and other experiences probably have a greater influence on that, in addition to any graduate work that you do. For example, I was a psychology major in undergrad, but I have a graduate degree, have skill and experience in statistics and tech, and make well above the median for psychology majors with grad degrees.
Other thoughts:
-Math is unavoidable, quite frankly. The majority of high-paying careers involve some level of mathematical manipulation. The only one I can think of that doesn’t is physician. Maybe some corporate lawyers, I suppose, who reach the tippy-top. But even most high-powered business executives deal with budget and such, although that math isn’t complex. Which is why I say you should define what you mean. Do you mean no advanced/complex math (which means finance, actuary/risk management, statistician, informatics, epidemiology are out?) Or do you mean not a lot of math period (which would rule out accounting, software development, market research, business management, and most other jobs that pay a decent wage)? Like I said, I was a psych major but math is a pretty significant part of my job.
-Job chances are partially determined by major. Of course, computer science majors on average have better job prospects than English majors. But they are also partially determined by your skills. An English major with web design skills, excellent writing samples, and two excellent and relevant internships probably has better prospects than a computer science major who doesn’t code well and hasn’t done any internships.
-Quality is just as important as, or more important, than quantity. There may be “more” total jobs for engineers out there, but that doesn’t matter if you hate calculus, or don’t like working with your hands, or if all the jobs for engineers are in places you don’t want to live. Conversely, there may be fewer jobs in marketing (and/or they are more competitive because of all the people who qualify for those jobs), but maybe you totally rock at marketing and they’re all jobs you could see yourself in and enjoy.
So I say think about the kinds of skills you want to build and what tasks you will do every day in a job. Or think about the specific things that are important to you. Do some research on careers that make the amount of money you are comfortable with and then go for those. I mean, if you want to make private jet, summers in St. Barth’s, winter home on the French Riviera type money then there’s a small subset of jobs you need to look to (most of them are math-oriented, and in the financial or tech industry). But if by “good amount” you mean you want to support your family on an upper-middle-class income (a nice house, good suburb with good schools, nice clothes, nice cars, vacation or two every year, etc. whatever) then there are lots of jobs/careers that can lead to that.
If you’re smart enough to get a good LSAT score, you can major in a light liberal arts subject and get into an elite law school -> big bucks. But you’ll also have 150,000 dollars in law school debt, and most lawyers hate their jobs, so you probably shouldn’t do this.
Despite outsourcing, IT jobs are still more plentiful than most.
You can technically get a job in Silicon Valley as a self-taught programmer, though I’m not sure if they may ask you math-based questions on your interview (prob not anymore).
Doesn’t pre-med have calculus requisites? After that there’s not much math. But like law school, it’s a really big gamble from a debt, time and job satisfaction angle.
Doctor? Professor (but you sounded unenthusiastic about that)? Computer programming? Entrepreneurship could also pay off if you’re willing to work at it.
I think finding a job that will pay you a “decent amount of money” comes more down to finding your niche and something you are really good at that you can offer to potential employers that other people can’t.
Management/administration in human resources, marketing, social services, property, colleges and medical/health services; market research/expertise; web development; computer user support; counseling (especially drug abuse & mental health); social services in healthcare, mental health and drug abuse; self-enrichment teaching; entertainment production; physical therapy; occupational therapy; speech-language pathology; nursing; radiologic technology; and insurance and financial services sales are the occupational areas in the 2014 exhaustive Bureau of Labor Statistics list (http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_102.htm and http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#00-0000) that meet the criteria of: at least 8% expected growth 2014-2024 (better than average), at least 50,000 expected openings 2014-2024, at least $40,000/yr mean pay in 2014, entailing college, and not requiring an extensive medical education. Paralegal work, which may interest you (http://www.rasmussen.edu/degrees/justice-studies/blog/what-i-wish-i-knew-before-becoming-paralegal/), only failed to make this list because its 7.6% expected growth is under 8%.
According to the approximately 83 survey respondents at http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Degree=Bachelor_of_Arts_%28BA%29%2c_History/Salary with a BA in history, 21 became lawyers and 18 were high school teachers. All the rest were in some kind of administrative office job. The survey respondents at Student Review dot com show more diversity and less of them are lawyers.
I speculate that most of the history BAs that have gone on to work in administration would be doing their jobs better had they taken some business courses. It might, in fact, have been better had they majored in business or organizational management and just taken a few courses in history. Since history BAs generally work with people a lot, history students shouldn’t get “lost” in books, but rather should keep active with, and learn about, people.
What possible evidence could you have of this? History is the study of people’s behavior - historically, yes, but historical understanding of people helps us understand current social movements and behavior.
Also, while Payscale can give you an okay idea of the kinds of jobs that our out there, the sample is not a representative sample of majors in any one area at all. For one example, it’s supposed to be for people with a BA in history - there’s another section for people with JDs, but some people chose to fill out the BA in history section. But it might not include the history majors who got MBAs, MSWs, and master’s degrees in other fields. It also certainly doesn’t include any history majors who have never used Payscale when job hunting (I haven’t used Payscale when job hunting, so my job and salary isn’t represented, and even if it was it would be under Doctor of Philosophy and not BA in psychology).
The Payscale thing is, indeed, not great. Students Review dot com looks better, but this website won’t let me cite the link for it. What else is available (preferably not limited to just one college) that shows the actual job titles attained after specific majors? Better things may be out there, but I haven’t found them (yet).
Of course, showing all the degrees obtained by each individual would greatly increase the value of the information.
What in the world do you mean that you can only be a professor if you major in history??
First of all, odds are you can’t even be a professor with it—the academic job market in history is widely regarded to be the worst part of the whole bit of dismal that is the academic job market in general.
Second of all, very rarely do humanities (and even most social science) majors lead to jobs that have the name of the major in the job title. There are exceptions, of course (e.g., technical writing programs do produce a lot of technical writers), but the whole concept underlying the liberal arts, and particularly the humanities side of the liberal arts, is that it trains you not for a specific single job path (which time and technology may turn useless), but rather that it teaches you how to learn, which can allow you to step into a wide variety of jobs (and thus avoid your degree training becoming obsolescent). So if you love history, then do history. No, you (probably) won’t become a historian by job title, but you’ll have a pretty wide variety of things you can do anyway.
All that said, though, please don’t avoid math entirely. At least take some stats. Seriously, it’ll be helpful just in terms of general life skills.
A physician who reads medical research papers to keep up to date with current developments in the medical field is likely to encounter a significant amount of statistical analysis in such research papers.
Yes, but most physicians especially older ones don’t really understand all of the statistics involved in research. They get the basics and the overall conclusions but most don’t have extensive mathematical/statistical backgrounds.